AdTech

After developing software that automatically recognises cookie banners that do not comply with the GDPR (usually because they do not provide a clear one-click option to reject all non-essential cookies), noyb has sent over 500 complaints to companies they consider non-compliant and given them a one

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has filed a lawsuit in Hamburg against three AdTech industry trade bodies including the Interactive Avertising Bureau (IAB). Members of the IAB include big tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter...), data brokers (Equifax, Experian, Acxiom...)

Civil society organisations Civil Liberties union for Europe, Open Rights Group and Panoptykon Foundation have filed complaints against Google and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) member companies in Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Malta, Portugal and Romania. The complaints address privacy abuses

French data protection regulator CNIL fined Google and Amazon €100 million and €35 million respectively for breaches of the French Data Protection Act. The CNIL found that the French websites of Google and Amazon had not sought the prior consent of visitors before advertising cookies were saved on

After a two year investigation into credit referencing agencies (CRAs) Experian, Equifax and TransUnion - initiated in part pursuant to a complaint filed by PI against Equifax and Experian in November 2018 - the ICO has published a report finding "widespread and systemic data protection failings" in

noyb filed a complaint against address broker AZ Direct Österreich GmbH after it refused to provide information on the origin and recipients of data processed. The address broker, in a response to a data subject access request, claimed not to know where the residential address of the data subject –

PI filed a complaint against health website Doctissimo with the French data protection authority (CNIL) after our research found that Doctissimo engaged in programmatic advertising, and shared the results of online depression tests taken on its platform with third parties. The complaint argues

The Norwegian Consumer Council ( Forbrukerrådet) and noyb filed three formal complaints against Grindr and ad tech companies that were receiving personal data through the app: Twitter’s MoPub, AT&T’s AppNexus, OpenX, AdColony and Smaato. The complaint followed an investigation carried out by the

US state and local authorities are using data from a host of location tracking companies, some of them little-known, such as X-Mode Social, Foursquare Labs, Cuebiq, Unacast, Phunware, and SafeGraph, to help them decide how and when to reopen. Many of these companies are part of the adtech industry

In a sharp drop from the beginning of Canada's lockdown, after two months only one in six Canadians left their home on weekends compared to one in three at the beginning. The marketing company Environics Analytics compiled the report by analysing a database of anonymised location data from 2.3

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in conjunction with local and state governments, are using location data collected by the mobile advertising industry from millions of cellphones in order to better understand how Americans are moving during the COVID-19 pandemic and how those

The consumer and market trends insight company StatSocial announced Crisis Insights, which it claims tracks rapidly changing consumer audience dynamics to help US brands and CMOs respond effectively to the ongoing coronavirus epidemic and economic slowdown. StatSocial's Silhouette social data

The San Francisco-based big data company Grandata has created a heat map to show which areas of Argentina are best complying with the quarantine lockdown. Grandata used an "anonymised" dataset collected from apps that provide third parties with geolocation information. The heat map shows if an

After four years of negotiation, in 2017 Google began paying Mastercard millions of dollars for access to the latter's piles of transaction data as part of its "Stores Sales Measurement" service. Google, which claimed to have access to 70% of US credit and debit cards through partners, said that

GDPR complaints about Real-Time Bidding (RTB) in the online advertising industry were filed today with Data Protection Authorities in Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The complaints detail the vast scale of personal data leakage by Google and other major companies in the “Ad Tech”

Simultaneous complaints have been filed with European data protection authorities against Google and other ad tech firms. The complainants are being made by Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave, the private web browser, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, and Michael Veale of University